"No," Mary told him. "No. Let him suffer."
Edward paused, then he lowered the gun.
"Suffer," Mary whispered, and she leaned forward and kissed the pig's sweating forehead. He had thin brown hair, going bald. The pig made a gasping, clucking sound from his gaping throat. "Let's split!" Edward urged. Mary turned away from the pig, and she and Edward staggered off into the smoke, one of her hands pressed into her stomach as if to keep her insides from sliding out.
"Suffer," Mary Terror said, sitting in the olive-green van with Drummer. She rolled down her window and smelted the air. The reek of smoke and burning houses was all gone, but she remembered it. She and Edward had crawled past a parked pig car in the dense haze, a couple of pigs standing less than ten feet away and holding pump shotguns as they talked about kicking hippie ass. An abandoned concession stand four blocks north, at the edge of a weeded-up park, had a loose board. Mary and Edward had hidden there for over twenty-six hours, sleeping except when they had to kick the rats away from Mary's blood. Then Edward had gone out and found a pay phone, and he'd called some friends in Manhattan who owned a militant bookstore. Two hours after that, Mary awoke in an apartment listening to voices argue the fact that she was getting blood on everything and she couldn't stay there. Somebody came in with a medical bag, antiseptic, hypodermics, and shiny instruments. "Fucking mess," she heard him say as he removed the shrapnel and wood shards with forceps.
"My baby," Mary had whispered. "I'm going to have a baby."
"Yeah. Right. Eddie, give her another swig of the rum."
She drank the liquid fire. "Where's Jack? Tell Jack I'm going to have his baby."
Edward's voice: "Mary? Mary, listen to me. A friend of mine's going to take you on a trip. Take you to a house where you can rest. Is that all right?"
"Yes. I'm going to have a baby. Oh, I'm hurting. I'm hurting."
"You won't hurt long. Listen, Mary. You're going to stay at this house until you can get around, but you can't stay there very long. Only a week or so. Okay?"
"Underground railroad," she'd answered, her eyes closed. "I can dig it."
"I have to leave now. Can you hear me?"
"Hear you."
"I have to leave. My friend is going to take care of you. I've paid him some money. I've got to go right now. Okay?"
" 'Kay," she'd said. She had drifted to sleep, and that was the last time she'd seen Edward Fordyce.
Near Baltimore there was the gas station bathroom where Mary had delivered the dead infant girl from a belly held together with three hundred and sixty-two ragged stitches. There was a house in Bowens, Maryland, near the edge of Battle Creek Cypress Swamp, where Mary had lived for a week on lentil soup with a man and woman who never talked. At night the shrieks of small animals being devoured in the swamp sounded to her like crying babies.
The couple had let her read a New York Times story about the Shootout. It was a difficult thing to read. Edward, Lord Jack, and Bedelia Morse had escaped. James Xavier Toombs had been captured, alive but badly wounded. He would never tell about the weeping lady, Mary knew. James Xavier Toombs had a hole inside himself, and he could retreat into it, close the lid, and recite haiku in his inner sanctum.
The worst night, though, was when she dreamed about herself giving a baby boy to Lord Jack. It was terrible, because when it was over she was alone again.
"I was born right there. See it?" Mary picked up Drummer's bassinet. But Drummer was asleep, his pink eyelids fluttering and the pacifier gripped in his mouth. She kissed his forehead, a gentler kiss than she'd once given a suffering pig, and she returned Drummer's bassinet to the floorboard.
There were ghosts at 1105 Elderman Street. She could hear them singing songs of love and revolution with voices that would be young forever. James Xavier Toombs had been killed in a riot at Attica; she wondered if his ghost had returned here, and joined those of the other sleeping children. Linden, New Jersey. July 1, 1972. As Cronkite would have said: That was the way it was.
She felt very old. Tomorrow she would feel young again. She drove back the sixteen miles to the McArdle Travel Inn outside Piscataway, and when she cried a little bit no one saw.
4: A Crack in Clay
When the door opened, Laura thrust the half-killed bottle of sangria into Mark Treggs's face. "Here. I brought you a present."
He blinked, stunned, while behind him Rose stood up from the beanbag chair in which she'd been sitting, watching television. The two kids had been playing on the floor, the little girl with her Barbie and the boy with his GoBots; they stopped, too, and stared up at the visitor with wide eyes.
"Aren't you going to invite me in?" Laura asked, her breath smelling of sweet red wine.
"No. Please go away." He started to push the door shut.
Laura put her hand against it. "I don't know anybody here. It's a bitch drinking alone. Don't be rude, okay?"
"I don't have anything else to tell you."
"I know. I just want to be with somebody. Is that so bad?"
He looked at his wristwatch; Mickey Mouse was on the dial. "It's almost nine o'clock."
"Right. Time to do some serious drinking."
"If you don't leave," Treggs said, "I'm going to have to call the police."
"Would you really?" she asked him. A silence stretched, and Laura saw that he would not.
"Oh, let her in, Mark!" Rose stood behind him. "What's it going to hurt?"
"I think she's drunk."
"No, not yet." Laura smiled thinly. "I'm working on it. Come on, I won't stay long. I just need to talk to somebody, all right?"
Rose Treggs pushed her husband aside and opened the door to admit her. "We never closed our door in anybody's face, and we won't start now. Come on in, Laura."
Laura crossed the threshold with her bottle of wine. "Hi," she said to the kids, and the little boy said, "Hi" but the little girl just stared at her. "Close the door, Mark, you're letting the cold in!" Rose told him, and he muttered something deep in his beard and shut the door against the night.
"We figured you'd gone back to Atlanta," Rose said.
Laura eased down onto the sofa. Springs jabbed her butt. "Not much to go back to." She uncapped the sangria and drank from the bottle. The last time she'd drunk anything straight from a bottle, it was half-price beer back at the University of Georgia. "I thought I wanted to be alone. I guess I was wrong."
"Isn't anybody going to worry about you?"
"I left a message for my husband. He's o-u-t. Out." Laura took another swig. "Called Carol and told her where I was. Carol's my friend. Thank God for friends, huh?"
"Okay, rug rats," Treggs said to the children. "Time for bed." They instantly began to caterwaul a protest, but Treggs got them up and moving.
"Are you the lady whose baby got taken?" the little boy asked her.
"Yes, I am."
"Mark Junior!" the elder Mark said. "Come on, bedtime!"
"My dad thinks you're wearing a wire," the boy told her. "See my GoBot?" He held it up for her inspection, but his father grasped his arm and pulled him toward the hallway. "Nighty-night!" Mark Junior had time to say. A door slammed, rather hard.
"Bright child," Laura said to Rose. "I'm not, though. Wearing a wire, I mean. Why would I be?"
"Mark's a little suspicious of people. Goes back to his Berkeley days, I guess. You know, the pigs were putting wire mikes on kids posing as radicals and taping everything that was said at SDS meetings. The FBI got a lot of files on people that way." She shrugged. "I wasn't into politics that much. I mostly just, like, hung out and did macramé."
"I was into politics." Another sip of the red wine. Her tongue felt furry. "I thought we could change the world with flowers and candles. With love." She said it as if uncertain what it meant anymore. "That was pretty damned stupid, wasn't it?"